“For most of decision-takers – either governments or businessmen – the main obstacle is on the economic side,” Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.

“So as the American campaign once said, ‘It's the economy, stupid’” – referring to the informal slogan of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

A growing chorus of power brokers are making the case that tackling climate change makes economic sense above all else. The latest is Former U.S. Treasury Sectary Henry Paulson, a Republican who served under George W. Bush.

He has now joined an army of top U.S. business leaders with an economic analysis of doing nothing, called “Risky Business.”

“It is possible, completely,” Calderon said. “We can have economic growth, poverty alleviation – we can create jobs being responsible with the environment.”

Thirty percent of the country is below sea level, and would sit under the ocean were it not for centuries of effort by the Dutch, battling the sea.

New York, ravaged by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012, has taken note.

“I really have to stress this,” Henk Ovink, who is spearheading the effort to bring Dutch knowhow across the Atlantic, says: “Water is not a threat; it's an asset. Especially for the Dutch.”

The Netherlands’ lessons could not come any sooner. Two separate groups of American scientists are now warning that the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting, and nothing can be done to stop it. One section alone would increase sea levels four feet, NASA says.

And this after last week’s White House report, which said climate change is a clear and present danger – not some abstract problem for the future.

The Netherlands has water engrained in its culture, acquired over centuries. But can the country export its unique approach to New York – and the world – in the short time needed to living with rising sea levels?

“It's not easy,” Ovink told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. “It's very hard. It is a change between your ears and eyes. It is a change of culture and therefore a change of the heart, which is always harder than an engineering change, or harder than an investment decision. You really have to change the way we go about water.”

The British are famous for obsessing about the weather – but with the wettest January in 250 years, and parts of Southern England literally submerged in water, they have lots to obsess about.

For Rachel Kyte, World Bank Special Envoy for Climate Change, extreme weather events are just another example for why climate change should be discussed not just as an environmental problem, but an economic one.

“The extreme weather events that we thought were going to happen to somebody else, over there, in the future, and now are actually happening right now, here, to us,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.

“What we’re trying to do is bring the science of climate, which nobody’s arguing about now, into the economic policy-making rooms,” she said. “We want to try to bring the science and the economic planning together so we have a difference set of decisions being made.”

Are the record-low temperatures in the United States and Canada – not to mention the extreme flooding in the UK and a record heat wave in Australia – the result of climate change?

Maybe not, but that says nothing about the validity of climate change, Climatologist Richard Alley told CNN’s Hala Gorani, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour, on Tuesday.

“Maybe a little bit of climate change, but this is mostly weather – big, exciting weather,” he said. “We’ve only warmed it one degree, and this is a 20-degree cold snap. So mostly, this is weather.”

In other words, higher sea levels from greenhouse gases may have contributed to recent flooding in the UK, but the temperatures are mostly the result of a fluke event, the shifting south of frigid polar winds, known as the polar vortex.

But it’s not nearly as simple as just saying the cold snap is not a result of climate change.

“We know the globe is warm,” he said. “If you look today, the average temperature of the whole world is above its long-term average.”

Climate skeptics are using the record cold spell as an argument in support of their contention that the phenomenon is not real.

Wildfires are raging in a ring around Sydney, Australia, as that country experiences its hottest year on record.

“The World Meteorological Organization has not established a direct link between this wildfire and climate change – yet,” Figueres said. “But what is absolutely clear is the science is telling us that there are increasing heat waves in Asia, Europe, and Australia; that there these will continue; that they will continue in their intensity and in their frequency.”

Australia’s new prime minister, Tony Abbott, has expressed deep scepticism about climate change, once even calling it “absolute c**p” (he has since walked those remarks back).

Abbott is trying to get rid of Australia’s carbon tax and has dissolved its climate change commission.

“What the new government in Australia has not done is it has not walked away from its international commitment on climate change,” Figueres told Amanpour. “So what they’re struggling with now is not what are they going to do, but how are they going to get there.”

It’s not supposed to be fire season yet in Australia, where summer hasn’t even begun. But more than sixty devastating bush fires are already raging in a ring around Sydney.

Just a month ago, Australians elected a new prime minister, Tony Abbott, who once called climate change “absolute c**p.” (He has since walked those remarks back, calling them a bit of “rhetorical hyperbole.”)

Though it is unclear that climate change directly caused these wild fires – police arrested two teenagers for starting two of the Sydney fires –local officials do fear those hot, dry, and windy conditions this week could exacerbate the situation.

In the past 12 months, Australia has lived through the hottest summer, in the hottest year, on record.

“There is a real political debate about how to deal with this issue of climate change,” Stan Grant, international editor of Sky News Australia, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.

“Tony Abbot in the past has been citizen for being a climate skeptic, if not a climate change denier,” Grant said. “Now he stepped back a lot from that hard line that he’s taken, but he’s been very ideological when it comes to how to deal with this.”